oihfedfhorigiojisdeffandomcom-20200214-history
Luck1
Some people end up worse off than others partly because of their bad luck. For instance, some die young due to a genetic disease, whereas others live long lives. Are such differential luck induced inequalities unjust? Many are inclined to answer this question affirmatively. To understand this inclination, we need a clear account of what luck involves. On some accounts, luck nullifies responsibility. On others, it nullifies desert. It is often said that justice requires luck to be ‘neutralized’. However, it is contested whether a distributive pattern that eliminates the influence of luck can be described. Thus an agent's level of effort—something few would initially see as a matter of luck—might be inseparable from her level of talent—something most would initially see as a matter of luck— and this might challenge standard accounts of just deviation from equality (or, for that matter, other favored distributive patterns). Critically, relational egalitarians argue that so-called luck egalitarians' preoccupation with eliminating inequalities reflecting differential bad luck misconstrues justice, which, according to the former, is a matter of social relations having a suitably egalitarian character. *1. Different Kinds of Luck *2. Distributive Justice *3. Thin Luck *4. Thick Luck *5. Independent Notions of Luck *6. How Much is There? *7. Option Luck Versus Brute Luck *8. Neutralizing Luck and Equality *9. Non-Separability of Luck and Effort *10. Equal Status, Humiliating Revelations and the Critique of Luck-Egalitarianism *Bibliography *Academic Tools *Other Internet Resources *Related Entries ---- 1. Different Kinds of Luck Luck is a pervasive feature of human life (Williams 1981, 21). It appears to arise in four main ways (Nagel 1979; Statman 1993, 11). First, the outcomes of our actions are affected by luck (resultant luck). In the mid-1990es it may have seemed prudent to take a degree in computer science; someone who did so and completed a course just before the IT bubble burst unforeseeably in 2000 may rightly see her ensuing unemployment as bad resultant luck. Second, the circumstances in which one acts introduce luck (circumstantial luck). A person who is offered proper incentives and plenty of time to deliberate may make a wiser decision than she would under less favorable conditions; it may be by accident that she finds herself in the favorable conditions and hence makes the wiser decision (but see Pritchard 2005, 254–261). Third, luck affects the kind of person you are (constitutive luck). Genetically, some people are at greater risk of cancer through smoking than others, and because of this it makes sense to say that some smokers are lucky to avoid cancer. Finally, there is luck in the way one's actions are determined by antecedent circumstances (antecedent causal luck). Children who grow up in a stimulating environment perhaps become more motivated than they would in a duller setting; yet children rarely determine the time and place in which they are raised. When we add up resultant, circumstantial, constitutive, and antecedent causal luck, the area of life that is free of luck seems to shrink “to an extensionless point” (Nagel 1979, 35; compare Parfit 1995, 10–12). Luck that does not affect a person's interests is irrelevant from the point of view of justice. But luck that does—whether the interests are characterized in terms of welfare, resources, opportunities, capabilities to achieve functionings, or in some other way—certainly seems relevant. People who end up less well (or better) off than others as a result of luck often ask “Why me?” (Otsuka 2004, 151–152). For instance, many affluent people, reflecting on the situation of people in developing countries, would be inclined to think that it is simply the latter's bad luck to have been born in poor countries. They would further assume that it is their own good luck to have been born in affluent countries, that they do not deserve their favorable starting position, and that this makes the inequality unjust. If those who live in developing countries were in the situation they find themselves in through their own fault, and not victims of bad luck, no question of distributive justice would arise. But they are not, and it seems unfair and unjust that some people's prospects are worse than others' simply in virtue of birthplace (Caney 2005, 122; for opposing considerations see Miller 2007, 56–75). The underlying assumption seems to be that luck-affected differential standings are morally undesirable or unjust (Arneson 1989, 85; Tan 2012, 149–185; Temkin 1993, 200); but this assumption calls for philosophical clarification. Given the pervasiveness of luck, such clarification appears to be required whenever people end up unequally well off. 2. Distributive Justice It is commonplace to distinguish between retributive justice and distributive justice. In both cases the issue of bad luck arises, and offhand it seems that the role one ascribes to luck in one area will constrain the role one can ascribe to luck elsewhere: if luck raises questions about the significance of desert in the sphere of distributive justice, it will probably have similar repercussions vis-a-vis desert and retributive justice (Sandel 1982, 91-92; Scheffler 1992, 306). In the present entry, however, we shall focus on relations between luck and distributive justice. In fact it will be useful to narrow the focus further to a particular family of theories of distributive justice—namely, those involving an end-result principle of justice (Nozick 1974, 153–155). End-result principles entail that one can judge whether a certain distribution of goods is desirable without knowing how it came about. The following are well-known principles of this kind and/or theories giving a central role to them. (a) Crude egalitarianism, given which it is bad or unjust if some people are worse off than others. (b) Crude sufficientarianism, given which it is bad or unjust if some people do not have enough of whatever is the relevant currency of distributive justice (Frankfurt 1988, 134–158; see also Casal 2007; Huseby 2010; Shields 2012). © Prioritarianism, given which we should maximize the sum of welfare that is weighted to ensure that benefits at lower levels of welfare have more weight than those at higher levels (Holtug 2010, 202–243). (d) The difference principle, given which it is unjust if the worst off are less well off than they could be. (Strictly speaking, Rawls himself says that the difference principle applies to the basic structure of society (Scheffler 2006, 102–110; compare Cohen 2000, 134–147; Cohen 2008, 116–180), so for Rawls it applies only indirectly to outcomes. On this understanding, the difference principle is not, in any straightforward sense, an end-state principle. Here I prefer to treat the difference principle as one that applies directly to outcomes. Many observers handle the difference principle this way, and some subscribe to such a principle on merit, regardless of whether it should be labeled “the difference principle.” Some writers, such as G. A. Cohen, think that Rawls ought to understand his principle in this way, in view of the principle's rationale.) Finally, there is (e) utilitarianism, given which we should maximize the sum of welfare. There are two reasons for narrowing the focus in this way. First, some end-result principles have been defended on the basis of considerations about luck. Thus it is often suggested that considerations about neutralizing luck favor the difference principle over ‘historical’ principles of justice, i.e., principles defining justice in terms of the way a distribution of goods comes about. No such suggestion has been made on behalf of non-end-result principles. Take Nozick's entitlement view. On this view, it may be a matter of luck what people are entitled to, and yet Nozick explicitly claims that this does not erode the relevant entitlements (Nozick 1974, 225). Second, many have inserted into end-result principles clauses that allow for deviations from the prescribed end-result provided that these deviations do not reflect luck. For instance, most contemporary egalitarians believe that an unequal distribution that is not a matter of bad luck for the worse off could be just. Luck plays no comparable role in historical principles. The important conceptual point is that, as Arneson puts it, we should distinguish the “luckist” element in a theory of distributive justice from the end-result favored by the theory, when setting aside “luckist” concerns (Arneson 2006). John Rawls' work explains why the concept of luck has had a central place in discussions of justice over the last 30 years. In an immensely influential section of his A Theory of Justice he introduced the metaphors of the social and natural lotteries (for a brief overview over Rawls' appeal to luck and the legacy of this appeal, see Knight and Stemplowska 2011, 2-9). The underlying idea is that every person's starting point in society is the outcome of a social lottery (the political, social, and economic circumstances into which each person is born) and a natural lottery (the biological potentials each person is born with). Rawls says that the outcome of each of person's social and natural lottery is, like the outcomes of ordinary lotteries, a matter of good or bad “fortune” or “luck” (Rawls 1971, 74, 75). Hence, since one cannot possibly merit, or deserve, an outcome of this kind, people's starting positions cannot be justified by appeal to merit or desert (Rawls 1971, 7, 104). It can be seen, then, that Rawls' social and natural lotteries provide negative support of his theory of justice. They undermine alternative theories in which distributions of social and economic benefits deviating from that prescribed by the difference principle are tolerated (Nozick 1974, 216; Arneson 2001, 76). They also underpin Rawls' claim that a system of natural liberty—one in which formal equality of opportunity obtains in that “all have at least the same legal rights to all advantaged social positions” (Rawls 1971, 72) and applicants are assessed on their merits alone—is unjust because “it permits distributive shares to be improperly influenced by” the outcomes of the social and natural lottery. Luck also plays an important positive role in Rawls' work. Since we can regard people's natural talents as a matter of luck, it is appropriate, Rawls thinks, to regard their distribution as a “common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be.” This means that “those who have been favored by nature…. may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out” (Rawls 1971, 101. This point is put somewhat less strongly in the second edition of A Theory of Justice). This is exactly what the difference principle, in one of its versions, says. Moreover, if we assume an independently plausible principle of redress which says that “undeserved inequalities… are to be compensated for”, and if people's lives are shaped by undeserved outcomes of the social and the natural lottery, then we can say that the difference principle “does achieve some of the intent of the of redress” (Rawls 1971, 101). (While it is undeniable that luck plays a role in A Theory of Justice, and that the considerations described above are congenial to luck-egalitarians, some commentators argue that this role is exaggerated and misconceived when Rawls is understood in luck-egalitarian fashion (Scheffler 2003, 8-12, 24-31; Scheffler 2005; Scheffler 2006; Freeman 2007, 111–142; Mandle 2009, 24–29). In Section Eight I ask whether the luck-neutralizing aim can play a positive role in justifying equality, an issue that is, of course, distinct from the question whether it has been widely thought to be capable of playing such a role.) Luck has been examined closely in the writings of successive egalitarians (Arneson 1989; Arneson 2011; Cohen 2008; Cohen 2011; Dworkin 2000; Nagel 1991; Rakowski 1991; Roemer 1993; Roemer 1996; Roemer 1998; Temkin 1993). (While the philosophers mentioned here are often referred to as “luck egalitarians”, not all of them favor this label (e.g., Dworkin 2003, 192)). Ronald Dworkin holds that differences in wealth generated by differences “traceable to genetic luck” (Dworkin 2000, 92) are unfair. He describes a hypothetical insurance device which, on the one hand, neutralizes “the effects of differential talents” (Dworkin 2000, 91) and, on the other hand, is insensitive to the different ambitions people have in their lives (Kymlicka 2002, 75–79). Similarly, G. A. Cohen writes that “anyone who thinks that initial advantage and inherent capacity are unjust distributors thinks so because he believes that they make a person's fate depend too much on sheer luck” (Cohen 2011, 30). In his view, “the fundamental distinction for an egalitarian is between choice and luck in the shaping of people's fates” (Cohen 2011, 4). Generally speaking, sufficientarians do not incorporate a “luckist” element into their views about distributive justice. A sufficientarian theory that does so might say, e.g., that it is unjust if some people do not have enough through no fault or choice of their own (“luck-sufficientarianism”, we might call this view). The reason sufficientarians tend not to endorse some such view is that they believe that people are entitled to a certain minimum, however they exercise their responsibility. Luck is also appealed to by some who believe that benefits matter more, morally speaking, the worse off those to whom the benefits accrue are. Thus Richard J. Arneson has defended a version of prioritarianism accommodating the “generic egalitarian intuition” that “fortunate individuals should give up resources to improve the life prospects of those whose initial conditions are unpropitious the upshot of bad luck” (Arneson 1999, 227). According to this view, “the moral value of achieving a gain (avoiding a loss) for a person” is “greater, the lower the person's lifetime expectation of well-being prior to receipt of the benefit (avoidance of the loss)” and “greater, the larger the degree to which the person deserves this gain (loss avoidance)” (Arneson 1999, 239–240). Finally, while no one has argued that utilitarianism is grounded in reflections on luck, it has certainly been argued that non-luck considerations qualify our obligation to maximize welfare. Fred Feldman, for instance, defends a version of consequentialism that adjusts utility for justice on the basis that a pleasure is more valuable if it is deserved and less valuable, or perhaps even disvaluable, if it is undeserved (Feldman 1997). Given an appropriate account of desert, this position might be looked upon as luck-utilitarianism (or luck-consequentialism). On one version of this kind of view (one differing from Feldman's), the moral value of an outcome always increases with increasing welfare for individuals. But as is the case with Arneson's responsibility-sensitive prioritarianism, on this view the moral value of an extra unit of welfare to a person is “greater, the larger the degree to which the person deserves this gain (loss avoidance).” 3. Thin Luck The concept of luck is a curious one (Dennett 1984, 92; see also Pritchard 2005, 125–133). To avoid various pitfalls, it helps to distinguish thin and thick notions of luck (as suggested by Hurley 2002, 79–80; Hurley 2003, 107–109; Vallentyne 2006, 434). To say that something—whether a choice or an outcome (other than choice) (Olsaretti 2009; Scheffler 2003, 18–19)—is a matter ofthin luck for someone is to say merely that this person does not stand in a certain moral relationship to a certain object, where such moral relationship essentially involves this individual in his or her capacity as a rational agent. To say that something is a matter of thick luck is to say this and to commit oneself to a certain account of the non-moral properties in virtue of which this moral relationship obtains. Accordingly, a thick concept of luck is a more specific version of the corresponding thin concept of luck. In either case, to say that something is a matter of luck for someone, in the sense of “luck” that is relevant to justice, is to imply that it affects this person's interests for good or bad. There are several varieties of thin notions of luck. One is the following kind of responsibility luck: #Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, X is not morally responsible for Y. In this definition, like those set out below, “X” ranges over individuals and “Y” ranges over items that can be a matter of luck for an individual, e.g., events, states of affairs, personality traits, actions, omissions, and much else. A number of views about what makes an agent responsible for something have been taken (for an overview, see Matravers 2007, 14–64). On responsibility for actions (and omissions), (a) some emphasize the role of the ability to act otherwise (Ayer 1982; Moore 1912), (b) others focus on whether an act is appropriately related to the agent's real self (Frankfurt 1988; Watson 1982), and © yet others think that what matters is whether the agent acted from a suitable reasons-sensitive mechanism (Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Fischer 2006). To say that an outcome conforms to (1) is to remain neutral on which of these accounts is correct. (It has become common to distinguish between attributive and substantive responsibility (Scanlon 1999, 248–251; Scanlon 2006, 72–80). The former concerns what comprises a suitable basis for moral appraisal of an agent. The latter concerns what people are required to do for one another. While the issue of luck arises in relation to both senses of responsibility, it is the latter which is crucial to distributive justice). Thin notions of luck need not be notions of responsibility luck. Thus the following notion of desert luck is thin: #Y is a matter of thin luck for X if, and only if, it is not the case that X deserves Y. As with responsibility, a number of views about what makes an agent deserving are possible (Kagan 2012, 6–7; Sher 1987, 7). Some accounts hold the basis of desert to be the value of one's contribution, while others hold the desert basis to be one's level of effort. People who think that justice should neutralize the luck specified by (2) can disagree over these accounts. It is worth emphasizing that thin responsibility luck and thin desert luck are independent of one another. First, X may be responsible for Y and yet not deserve Y. Thus a man who heroically throws himself on to a grenade to save his comrades, thereby losing his life, is responsible for his own death—indeed this is what makes his act praiseworthy—even if he did not deserve to die. Second, X may deserve Y without being responsible for Y. Thus a poor saint who stumbles, entirely fortuitously, upon a gold nugget might deserve (in the wider scheme of things) to be enriched by his discovery even though he is not responsible for making it. Other thin notions of luck can be described, but thin desert luck and (especially) thin responsibility luck have received the lion's share of attention in the literature on distributive justice. While clearly different, they are occasionally conflated (as pointed out in Hurley 2003, 191–95). 4. Thick Luck The claim that something is a matter of thin responsibility luck can be combined with various accounts of responsibility and thus various accounts of luck. It is these latter accounts—thickaccounts of responsibility luck—that tell us what makes a person responsible for something. On the thick, control-based account of responsibility luck: #Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is not responsible for Y if, and only if, X does not and did not control Y (Otsuka 2002, 40; Zimmerman 1993, 219). A competing thick, choice-based account of responsibility luck says: #Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is not responsible for Y if, and only if, Y is not, in an appropriate way, the result of a choice made byX (cf. Cohen 2011, 13). To see how these control-based and choice-based notions diverge, consider a Frankfurtian scenario in which Y comes about as a result of X's choice, but X did not control whether Y came about because had X not chosen to bring about Y, then Y would have been realized through some alternative causal means (Frankfurt 1988). Conversely, in a case in which X fails to make up his mind whether to prevent Y coming about and then finds he can no longer control the outcome, it might be said that Y does not come about as a result of X's choice even if X controlled Y. Often it makes a crucial difference which items Y ranges over (see Cohen 2011, 25, 93; Price 1999). Suppose, for instance, that a person deliberately, and in full control, cultivates a preference for spending leisure hours driving about in her car reasonably foreseeing that the prices of gas will stay low (Arneson 1990, 186). Unfortunately, and unpredictably, the price of gas skyrockets and her preference becomes very costly. In this case, the fact that this person prefers to spend her leisure hours driving her car is neither bad control luck, nor bad choice luck. However, the fact that she is worse off as a result of her preference may be both, since she neither chose to act in such way to make this fact obtain, nor controlled whether it did. We might say of this person that she had “bad price luck” It has been argued that both the control-based and choice-based thick notions of luck are too broad. Most people neither control nor choose their religion, yet it seems odd to ask for compensation for feelings of guilt engendered by religious belief on the grounds that it is a matter of bad luck that one holds those beliefs (Scanlon 1975; Cohen 2011, 33–37). To accommodate this intuition G. A. Cohen introduces the notion of counterfactual choice. One can explain this notion with the following claim: #Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) X is not responsible for Y; and (ii) X is not responsible for Y if, and only if, Y is not the result of a choice made by X and X would not choose Y if X could. Given the opportunity to do so, the theist would not choose to be free of the feelings of guilt engendered by his religious convictions. Therefore, it is not a matter of luck that he has such feelings and so justice does not require him to be compensated for the feelings. As Cohen says, the costs of the unchosen and uncontrolled commitments of the religious believer “are so intrinsically connected with his commitments that they” are not bad luck (Cohen 2011, 36; compare Cohen 2011,88). Hence, if by “responsible for” we simply mean “should bear the costs of” (compare Ripstein 1994, 19n), the theist is responsible for his religiously mandated feelings of guilt. Just as there are different accounts of thick responsibility luck, there are different accounts of thick desert luck. These correspond to competing accounts of the basis of desert. One notion is that of thick, non-comparative desert luck, which can be elaborated as follows: #Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) it is not the case that X deserves Y; and (ii) Xdeserves Y if, and only if, it is fitting that X has Y given the moral or prudential merits of X. The notion fleshed out here contrasts with that of thick, comparative desert luck: #Y is a matter of luck for X if, and only if, (i) it is not the case that X deserves Y; and (ii) Xdeserves Y if, and only if, it is fitting that X has Y given the relative moral or prudential merits of X and Z and given what Z has. It may be a matter of bad thick, non-comparative desert luck that the crops of a talented, hard-working farmer are destroyed by cold weather. If, however, the crops of a farmer who is even more hard-working and talented are also destroyed, it will not be a matter of bad thick, comparative desert luck that the first farmer's crops are destroyed. The list of thick notions of luck mentioned so far is not intended to be exhaustive, and each notion may of course be developed in several directions. Clearly, thick luck is quite complex. 5. Independent Notions of Luck Some accounts of luck are neither thin accounts of luck nor aim at capturing a general moral notion such as responsibility or desert. Instead they appeal to an independent conception of luck. Lottery luck is arguably one example: #Y is a matter of luck for X if Y, from the perspective of X, is the outcome of a lottery. The underlying idea here is that there is a sense in which the outcome of a (fair) lottery is a matter of luck for the person who participates in it whether or not he is responsible for it—as some accounts of responsibility imply and others do not. It can be maintained that justice is concerned with this notion of luck independently of how it relates to responsibility and desert. Thus an egalitarian may think that it is bad if people are unequally well off as a result of differential lottery luck even if he has not made up his mind whether people are responsible for differential lottery luck. He might add that it would be illegitimate for the state to enforce equality in face of inequality resulting from a fair lottery to which all parties consented. Also, lotteries might be excellent means of making outcomes independent of the unjust biases of distributors (compare Stone 2007, 286–287), even if outcomes might be unjust despite the fact such biases played no role in their genesis. In principle, one could also care about choice and control luck independently of how these relate to thin luck, e.g., responsibility and desert. However, philosophers who think that justice is a matter of eliminating differential luck have studied choice and control mainly because they assume that the absence of choice and control nullifies responsibility or desert. 6. How Much Luck is There? Accounts of responsibility or desert affect how much luck there is in the world. If, on the one hand, one accepts a hard deterministic account of responsibility, everything is a matter of responsibility luck. A hard deterministic account of responsibility says that responsibility and determinism are incompatible, that determinism is true, and, hence, that no one is ever responsible for anything. Most believe that, if hard determinism is true, extensionally speaking, luck-egalitarianism collapses into straight equality of outcome (e.g., Smilansky 1997, 156; but see Stemplowska 2008). If, on the other hand, one accepts a compatibilist, reason responsiveness account of responsibility, many outcomes will not be a matter of responsibility luck, at least for some agents. A compatibilist, reason responsiveness account of responsibility for outcomes says that an agent is responsible for outcomes that he or she brings about in the right sort of way through the agent's actions (or omissions) where these issue from an action-generating process that is sufficiently sensitive to practical reasons, e.g., normal human deliberation, and that actions may issue from such mechanisms whether or not determinism obtains (Fischer and Ravizza 1998). Still, agents who act from reason responsive mechanisms may face choice situations that differ much in terms of how favorable they are in which case inequalities reflecting such differences may not be just, even if they obtain between agents who are responsible for the choices they made. For this reason (among others), it is open for compatibilist luck-egalitarians to think that little inequality can be justified by differential exercises of choice (see Barry 2005). One issue which has received quite a lot of attention in the debate about justice and luck is the regression principle governing luck: #If the causes of Y are a matter of luck for X, so is Y. If this principle is coupled with control or choice accounts of luck, everything turns into luck. For if we couple (9) with, say, the thick, choice-based account of responsibility luck, it follows that for my present reckless driving not to be a matter of (bad) luck, it will have to be the case that I am responsible for, and hence have chosen, the causes of my present reckless driving. In turn, for me to be responsible for these causes I will in turn have to be responsible for, and hence have chosen, the causes of these causes of my reckless driving; and so on. Obviously, at some point, moving back through the causal chain (e.g., prior to my coming into existence, if not long before that), choice, and thus responsibility, will peter out. So it will follow that I am not responsible for my present reckless driving: it is my bad luck that I drive my car in a totally irresponsible way. Generalizing this sort of reasoning, no one would ever be responsible for anything—that everything would be a matter of responsibility luck. As Thomas Nagel writes “Everything seems to result from the combined influence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent's control. Since he cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be responsible for their results” (Nagel 1979, 35; compare Strawson 1994; Watson 2006, 428). The view that everything is a matter of responsibility (and desert) luck obviously flies in the face of our everyday ascriptions of responsibility. Accordingly, this implication of the regression principle is often deployed in a corresponding reductio ad absurdum (Hurley 1993, 183; Hurley 2003; Nozick 1974, 225; Sher 1997, 67–69; Zaitchik 1977, 371–373). However, this reductio is perhaps too hasty. It has been argued that the principle (applied to control) is not simply a matter of “generalization from certain clear cases.” Rather, it is a condition that we “are actually being persuaded” is correct when we apply it to cases “beyond the original set”, where, on reflection, we find that “control is absent” (Nagel 1979, 26–27). If this is right, it seems we need an alternative explanation of why moral responsibility is absent in those cases where control of causes is absent. So, for instance, if we agree that a person who offends, as an adult, as a result of childhood deprivation is not responsible for his action, we need to explain what, here, nullifies responsibility if not lack of control over causes of the agent's actions. That is, we need to explain why certain kinds of causal background to action threaten control while others do not even if we are dealing with cases with the shared feature that the agent does not control the early parts of those causal backgrounds. Addressing this problem, Fischer and Ravizza suggest that a “process of taking responsibility is necessary for moral responsibility” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 200). They add that, since processes are necessarily historical, it follows that their account of responsibility attends to an action's genesis or origins. With the same problem in mind, Susan Hurley suggests that responsibility requires that the process “by which reason-responsive mechanisms and self-perceptions in relation to these mechanisms are acquired” (Hurley 2003, 51) is one in which the agent is equipped with mechanisms that are sufficiently responsive to objective reasons (Hurley 2003, 51–2). That is, the reasons for which the agent acts must match the reasons for action that there in fact are sufficiently well, although this match need not be perfect. Whether either of these suggestions accommodates cases where, initially, responsibility seems to be undermined by lack of control of causes, remains to be seen. For a brief discussion of the notion of constitutive luck see the following supplementary document:Constitutive Luck.